Connector Contributor
It is the season for beers that warm the belly with pumpkin, spices, caramel malts and full-bodied flavors that pair perfectly with crisp autumn nights and your best flannel shirt. Fall may be halfway over, but there is still plenty of time to enjoy all of the autumnal beer goodness that local breweries have to offer.
Of the breweries throughout Massachusetts that hone in on crafting exceptional beers, there are a few that have put forth pumpkin varieties that deserve the spotlight. The most popular and most widely received include Fisherman’s Pumpkin Stout (Gloucester), Harpoon UFO Pumpkin (Boston), Great Pumpkin Ale (Cambridge) and Pumple Drumkin (Nantucket).
Gloucester’s own Cape Ann Brewing Company produces the tasty Fisherman’s Pumpkin Stout. It is a classic stout with its roasted malts and chocolate flavors, topped off with just a bit of pumpkin and spices to make one of the more flavorful “black-o-lanterns” on the market. It does not overwhelm the palate with sweetness and is a very drinkable heavier beer than the average pumpkin ales.
The Great Pumpkin Ale is known to be Cambridge Brewing Company’s most popular seasonal beer, giving off familiar autumnal scents of pumpkin and pumpkin spices whose flavor hits the tongue after an initial taste of sweet caramel malts. It ends with a slight hop tartness to even it all out.
Cisco Brewers’ Pumple Drumkin tastes as interesting and fun as the name sounds and the label looks. Unlike its sweeter contemporaries, Pumple Drumkin drinks more like a brown ale but in a very good way: Hints of pumpkin and spice remain subtle under an earthy, roasted full body that is definitive of a great beer at this time of year. It pairs well with a meal of hearty harvest vegetables and roasted chicken.
Both Cambridge Brewing Company and Cisco Brewers use locally grown pumpkins in their pumpkin beers. Their barley, additionally, is among the other local ingredients that go into the creation of their beers.
There are two more beers that deserve praise even though they are not New England brewed because they are possibly two of the best pumpkin beers ever created: Southern Tier Imperial Pumking (New York) and Weyerbacher Imperial Pumpkin (Pennsylvania).
Southern Tier crafted a beer akin to the taste of pumpkin pie with spices and sweetness at the forefront, but being a beer with a higher than average alcohol content, the sweetness is countered with warmth and a dry finish.
Weyerbacher also has strong notes of pumpkin, cinnamon, and cloves but more modestly so than the Southern Tier. If you prefer a beer with less sweet and a more bitter dryness, this is the one to choose.
These four local beers give other New England breweries stiff competition, but the dozens of others ought to be tasted and appreciated in the heart of a New England Autumn.
